Programming language choice related to music app

Hi everybody,

after years of programming with Max/MSP, I'm actually planning an application that surpasses its limits. I'd like to run this app possibly on all common desktop and mobile platforms (Windows / MacOS / Linux / iOS / Android / Windows mobile – I know there is no such thing, but maybe some language nears this ideal case). The app won't need a very fast computer, and will be free. I write this because several IDEs may cost a fortune if you use them to develop commercial software, and I'd like to avoid that.

I'm not going to need an all-round language like C++ or Java because my app doesn't

• use internet
• comunicate with what- or whomsoever in an intranet
• contain data bases
• need to meet any security conditions...

I had a look at RealBasic. You may create apps for at least the three named desktop operating systems, but it lacks two things:

• It's difficult to incorporate your own UI elements (and I'd like that very much)
• You'd have to buy time stretching and pitch shifting support of sound files from third party developers (those two abilities are strictly necessary for my app).

A lot of programming languages will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. However, for native apps, iOS uses objective-C exclusively, Android uses Java exclusively and Windows Phone uses neither of those (I don't know specifically what it uses). The closest you can get to "all of those" is Java, which will run on 4 / 6.

The alternative would be to build something internet based, which would allow you to write one application accessible from all of those. Incidentally, all six platforms indirectly support JavaScript (through their web browser), although JavaScript by itself is probably not suitable for a music app (hence the internet based part). However, even in this case you will still need at least two different programming languages.

I see. Thanks for the information. Then let's reformulate my question a bit. An internet based app is not possible because I'd like users explicitly to be able to work offline. As I'm no programmer, I fear that learning languages like C++ or Java would take much too much time. So is there a language that can be rather easily learned and that's able to compile a simple application for at least some of the standard operating systems? I often read that languages get complicated because they accumulate historically founded compatibility issues. As my project is untouched by that, I could also learn a young, maybe exotic language if it doesn't take years to handle it.

If you're just looking for something easy to learn which will generate some sort of music player, maybe C# is what you want. It compiles on windows (obviously) and has built-in form elements and whatnot. PHP is easy to learn, but it's a web language and not a desktop language. Python is also easy to learn, though confusing if you already know another imperative language. Plus, I don't know anything about python's GUI libraries. I assume there's one or more available, but to my knowledge they're not part of the core language like in C#

Python / Ruby / QT

Yeah, my own research brought me to Python or Ruby, maybe with QT as an IDE (it seems to support a lot of OS). Are there any experiences with these here on this forum? I'd be glad if you shared your points of view.